OUR POV: THE MMR BLOG

Something New in Our Toolkit: morphii

March 29, 2018 - mmr

A new type of survey question with a variety of applications, morphii helps clients understand what their customers really want using the science of emotion with a new tool that adds/enhances existing methodologies. More importantly, it is fun and engaging for respondents to use as it allows them to manipulate the expression of a morphii to report both type and intensity of emotion and other subjective experiences.

MMR has partnered with Vizbii International to test the morphii application in several different projects as part of our vetting process to bring to our clients best-in-class solutions. We are excited to share this patented platform, and help our clients enhance traditional approaches by enabling emotional response with minimal design impact. Here are some early examples….

Piloting a New Way to Test Ad Creative

In traditional ad testing, research helps us rank ads based on metrics like efficacy and appeal. These are often compared to norms, but the results don’t always tell us WHY the ads scores how they did or what the emotional impact was for the brand.

MMR turned to morphii to co-create and pilot test an emotion-based ad testing solution, and the results have allowed us to do more than evaluate the creative itself. We can go further by also analyzing:

– Improvement of brand perspective after viewing an ad

– What ads “move” people to think about brands in new ways?

– How emotionally influence-able is the target audience?

Our pilot test included 10 different commercial advertisements across 5 different industries with 2 major competitors each. See here for how results from our cellular service providers comparison of a humorous spot from TMobile (#Unlimited Moves Feat. Justin Bieber) to a more serious Verizon spot (Helping Keep Food Safe).

Mitigating Risk of Attrition

Another example of morphii enhancement was a recent MMR study with a national banking client. This client plans to migrate some of its customers from legacy checking and savings products to a smaller set of new products with some different features. Depending on the legacy account held, some customers will gain new features, some will lose existing features, some will have a mix of the two. The client had concerns about negative reactions to losing features, causing possible attrition.

Because it captures the primary emotional reaction to a stimulus, and also the intensity of that emotion, morphii was an excellent application for this research. In this case, the stimulus was a description of the migration event and a summary of the features on the customer’s current account along with the new account features after migration. With morphii, the customer was able to quickly and easily indicate how they would most likely react to such an event, providing the client with a clear view of the range of emotions the migration was likely to elicit and the risk of attrition across all its legacy products. As a result, the client was able to modify its migration strategy for certain legacy products and customers that were at greatest risk of attrition.

A final example comes from an MMR client that had a concept testing project, and the open-ended questions gave results that did not explain why the current concept performed lower than all the test concepts, nor did it explain why the concept that everyone thought would be the “loser” performed very well. Thankfully, the morphii results gave us the answers.

– The current concept was significantly more “MEH” than the other concepts. Honestly, none of the concepts were particularly exciting, so this didn’t come out in our traditional measures. But it explained why the concept did not perform as well.

– And what we thought was the “loser” concept? It created a higher and more intense feeling of “CURIOSITY”. A concept we thought was too technical to perform well prompted some to want to know more.

Including morphii allowed us to dig into the reasons behind unexpected findings, adding to the client’s confidence in the story.

What’s next?

MMR Research Associates will continue working with the morphii platform to test new ways emotional data can enhance results and add business impact.

MMR LIVE, a division of MMR Research, is leveraging morphii for CX. Our partnership lets MMR LIVE go beyond sentiment and the traditional NPS to humanize the measurement of customer experience and improve the action plan for clients. Look for more detail in Q2.

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